We have a saying in Sweden, "the more chefs, the worse the soup". It kinda embodies what I feel about yet another attempt at squeezing something new in through the door in hope of setting the standard.
It doesn't need to be the standard. Chrome now supports WebM, H.264, and Theora. Mozilla's position is that we will support multiple high-quality, open, and royalty-free standards if they are available:
"We believe that it is in the public interest for HTML5 video to be backed by multiple, open and royalty-free codecs available in a way that is consistent with the W3C license standards. We would absolutely consider H.264 if MPEG LA would make it available under open web terms as defined by the W3C standards. We stand by our position on Theora." (Mozilla press statement)
Definitely. This is not "just another video codec" - it is significantly better than any other open source video codec. That's a big deal.
And codecs are really really hard to create, for technical and legal reasons. It's not like 5 new production-ready video codecs come up every year. We might not see another credible open source codec for five years.
You are entirely leaving out one very important factor when it comes to video, and that is the video quality itself. Do you really think any user out there except Richard Stallman will give a damned about the fact that the codec is royalty free when the end-result might look worse than what they are enjoying on the web now due to bandwidth constrains putting harsh limits on bitrates? The answer is of course that it won't matter at all to them - they'll just be annoyed.
